DOWN THE ALLEY AND OVER THE FENCE

DOWN THE ALLEY AND OVER THE FENCE
An American Family, Chicago Style
1936 - 1951

by Walter Oleksy

Introduction

“Down the alley and over the fence.
I've got the can. Who’s got ten cents?”
(old beer-drinking song)

My sister Mary Jane, at the age of seven,
was a professional mourner. This was back in
1936 when we lived on the South Side of Chicago.

Rain, snow, or sunshine, Sis went to one of the
neighborhood funeral parlors and stood out front.
Lanky and with long dark hair, clutching a prayer
book and string of Rosary beads, she bowed her
head and sobbed. For this she was rewarded with
pennies from the bereaved who came to pay their
last respects to the deceased.

We were Catholic and Democrats, but Sis was the
first real liberal I knew. She never knew the
religion, occupation, or anything else about the
person lying in their casket inside the chapel.

Sis only got a hint as to who they were in life
because of the color ribbon on the crepe, the white
wicker basket of fresh-cut flowers that stood
outside the chapel door. A light purple ribbon was
for a man, white for a woman, pink for a baby or
child, and silver for an elderly man or woman.
Years later, purple became the standard color
ribbon for anyone deceased.

It didn't matter to Mary Jane who was in their
box inside the chapel. They got the best cry
she could send them off with for a penny.

During the school year, Sis had great hours.
She only worked after school on Fridays and also
on Saturday mornings. When school was out for
summer vacation, she made the rounds of the
chapels almost every day.

Fridays after school, she took up work outside the
Jewish funeral parlor in our neighborhood.
She found that, for some reason, the Jewish
bereaved gave her more pennies than Catholics or
Protestants.

Sis taught me resourcefulness and helped me learn
how to survive in hard times. Fifty years later,
after beating bladder cancer -- through sheer
determination not to let it lick her -- she’s still an
inspiration.

She drew upon her strong faith that the Lord
would help heal her. A mother with three kids,
she also looked up to heaven and told her late
husband John, “I’m not ready to play poker with
you up there. I want more time down here to
raise the kids.”

Our older brother Johnny Boy used to call her
“Saxophone Sis,” but I never knew why; she never
played the sax or any other musical instrument.
He also called her “Booth,” short for phone booth,
but I never knew why he gave her that moniker
either. She was always just "Sis" to me.

For younger readers who may not know what a
phone booth was, every drug store had one or
more little rooms like closets where you could
make a phone call in privacy. Like the British
police call booth in "Doctor Who."

We didn’t have a telephone in our apartment during
The Great Depression of the 1930s and until
World War II, so Mom used to give me some nickels
to go to the corner drug store phone booth and call
the gas and electric companies that we’d be late with
our payments. I also called the L. Fish furniture store
and said we’d be late paying for the furniture in our
apartment that we bought on time payments. It was
usually worn out before our folks made the final
payment.

We had a used car for a couple of months, until we fell
behind in payments and a man came from a finance
company and repossessed it.

A year and a half younger than my sister, my job was
to go around our block to aunts or neighbors and ask
for their empty soda or milk bottles. Johnny Boy and
Sis took them to the corner grocery store and redeemed
them for their deposits of one or two cents each.

When we pooled our pennies, we had enough for show
money. It only cost a dime to go to a neighborhood
movie palace and see two features straight from their
run in the downtown Chicago theaters. Maybe an
Errol Flynn adventure or a Sonja Heine ice-skating
musical. Or we went to a second-run theater and saw
three movies a few years old, for only a nickel.
There we saw a Tim McCoy or Buck Jones western,
maybe a Johnny Weissmuller "Tarzan," and a Boris
Karloff or Bela Lugosi "spooky." We seldom said
“Let’s go see ..." a movie by its title. It was always,
“Let’s go see the new Gary Cooper” or “Let’s go see
the new Bob Hope.”

Johnny Boy's job was to take all three of us to the
movies, stopping in the five-and-ten-cent store on
the way to buy a pound of licorice or butter kisses
for a dime. Then we entered the dark world of the
movie house and sat with our legs curled up under
us. We didn't take our eyes off the screen for four
or six hours while Johnny Boy divided up the candy
from a big bag. He sat between us and doled out
the goodies: One butter kiss for Mary Jane,
one for me.

There in the dark, was that when I began not to trust
my big brother? I was sure he took two for himself
every time.

Mom and Dad both worked and rarely went to the
movies with us. In 1936, my Austrian-born mother
ironed shirts in a Chinese hand laundry. She always
got there an hour early on hot summer days, so she
could get an ironing board near an open window.
Dad, an out-of-work master auto mechanic, drove a
trolley for the old Chicago Surface Lines. They didn't
have much time for going to the movies.

Millions of people lost their jobs during The Great
Depression. People survived the hard times by
their resourcefulness and sheer determination not
to cave in under adversity. Today, in times of
recession and job loss, many people are faced with
the same challenges we had over half a century ago.
But we made it and, if people today keep at it and
never give up faith or trying to survive, they can too.

My sister's and brother's grandchildren have a much
easier life than we did. To them, the 1930s and l940s
are ancient history, somewhere after the Ice Age and
before the invention of computers, I-pods, and the cell
phone. Our trials and tribulations in those distant
years are foreign but somewhat curious to them,
and they've asked many times, "Tell what it was like,
when you were a kid?"

To answer them, and to tell a story of our survival,
I decided to write about my boyhood, my mother and
father, and sister and brother in the "good old days"
when we were young.

You might ask, who cares? My folks and nobody else
in the family ever became famous or even infamous
for anything.

They just got born, worked usually not at what they
did best but what they could earn a living at, got
married or stayed single (as I did), had kids or didn't
(I stuck with dogs), lived ordinary lives and
sometimes did stupid things before they died and
left almost no footprints in the sand but often
imprints in our hearts.

No, they weren't very important. The thing is, you'll
probably see yourself in them or us, and others you
knew or know as well.

My memoirs’ title refers to an old beer-drinking song
my father and his brothers and sisters used to sing
after poker parties that lasted from after work on Fridays
to late Sunday nights at Grandma's house on the South
Side of Chicago before the men went off to fight in
World War II.

In among “On The Banks of the Wabash,” “My Gal Sal,”
“In the Evening by the Moonlight,” “Show Me the Way
To Go Home” and other songs they harmonized to,
they always sang:

"Down the alley and over the fence. I've got the can.
Who’s got ten cents?"

In the 1930s, you could take a tin pail to the corner
tavern and get it filled with tap beer for a dime.
Or, for the children, a pail or pitcher of root beer
also for only ten cents.

Back then, people sat on their front porches or door
steps on hot summer nights and talked while they
drank their beer, and maybe listened to someone
up the block play their piano in the parlor.

They say we can learn a lot from history, so maybe
we don't make the same mistakes twice. I believe
that's true. I also tend to believe it's true about
a person's family history.

Children today hardly get to know their parents
before they divorce. It's too bad, because
everything else aside, it's important to know
who your folks are, or were. It helps a person when
they grow up, to get to know who they are.

Most of the people in the stories that will follow have
gone to that big poker game in the sky. You
probably know or miss people like them.

Anyway, these are the stories I tell when the new
generation in the family ask, "Tell what it was like,
when you were a kid?"

These reminiscences are kind of a confession,
and I'm going to do my best to be honest about myself
but, of course, I'm not going to tell you everything.
As Holden Caulfield said in Catcher in the Rye,
the rest of the family would have two hemorrhages
apiece if I told anything too personal about them.

Mainly, It’s my wish that these memoirs will give
courage and hope to those today who are in hard times
or are scared for one reason or another.

For instance, lots of people today are scared of terrorism.
Sure, that’s something to be scared about. But let’s not
cave in about it.

Terrorism is not new to America. We had terrorism here
while I was growing up during World War II. Enemy
agents of the Nazis and Japanese infiltrated America to
blow up our airports, naval bases, and train stations,
or factories making planes or tanks. They just weren’t
called terrorists, maybe because our country’s leaders
wisely thought that was too scary a name. They were
called “Fifth Columnists,” but they were just as scary.

Some politicians today play on our fears -- intentionally --
in order to gain high office, claiming they more than any
other candidate will protect us from terrorists.
But making us fearful is not only un-helpful and
un-healthy, it‘s downright Un-American.

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
instead played on our courage when he said,
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

If we keep that in mind, we not only can lick terrorists,
we can lick anything.

I hope you’ll come along with me down the alley and
over the fence in future installments to read more about
how we licked joblessness, illness, divorce, war,
terrorism, scratched knees, bloody noses, deaths in
the family, and all the rest of what life throws at us.

We not only have to learn to duck, but to hit the ball back.
Hard and often. Or, most certainly, to bounce back.

Pollyanna? I don't think so.